AWS Solutions Architect · San Antonio, TX
Michael Groff
Building serverless, scalable, cost-optimized platforms on AWS for SMB to enterprise; serverless-first, IaC everything, security by default.
Currently Sr. Pre-Sales Solutions Architect / Team Lead @ AllCloud·12+ yrs cloud & hybrid infrastructure
About Me
I'm an AWS Sr. Solutions Architect at AllCloud, helping customers land on AWS the right way; serverless-first, IaC everything, security by default.
My background is ops (Rackspace Windows Admin AWS Cloud Support Engineer AWS Architect), which shapes how I think about what gets deployed: it has to run at 2 a.m. on a Sunday without anyone waking up.
Off the clock
- Native Texan from Bandera, TX
- Married to a Texas public school teacher
- Father of two daughters
- Fur-father of four; two Huskies, one standard-issue tabby, and one black cat
- Based in San Antonio, TX
- Avid tech enthusiast
Top 5 CliftonStrengths
Signature Themes PDFA need to collect and archive; information, ideas, artifacts, even relationships.
Work hard with great stamina; immense satisfaction from being busy and productive.
Prefer to go with the flow; take things as they come and discover the future one day at a time.
Continuous desire to learn and improve; the process excites more than the outcome.
Contagious enthusiasm; naturally upbeat, energizes others.
Gallup's CliftonStrengths assessment has been a good lens for how I collaborate and pick problems worth solving.
Skills & Stack
Things I use regularly enough to have opinions about. Recruiters can `⌘F` freely.
AWS
Primary cloud. Daily driver.
AWS Governance & Security
Multi-account landing zones and the guardrails around them.
Networking
Connectivity between accounts, regions, and what's left on-prem.
IaC & Languages
Everything deployable via pull request.
Pre-Sales & Solution Design
Turning a business outcome into something sellable and buildable.
Patterns & Practices
How I like to build.
Specializations
Industries and focus areas I've spent real time in.
CI/CD & GitOps
Pipelines that ship; declarative delivery into Kubernetes.
Platforms & Observability
OS and virtualization underneath, and knowing what production is doing.
Depth varies; some are daily tools, others are things I've shipped to production and can speak to with real opinions. Happy to go deep on any of them.
Experience
Sr. Pre-Sales Solutions Architect / Team Lead
July 2026 – Present
- ▸Player-coach lead for a pre-sales solutions architecture team spanning cloud infrastructure and data/AI; personally own pre-sales on the most strategic and complex opportunities, and ensure what is sold is what delivery can build.
- ▸Own review and approval of level-of-effort estimates, solution designs, and proposals before they reach the customer, and estimation discipline end to end: scoping, assumptions, risk, phasing, and pricing inputs.
- ▸Allocate architect coverage against pipeline priority, deal size, and technical fit; build reusable discovery frameworks, estimation models, and proposal templates; contribute to hiring and onboarding, including authoring the pre-sales SA interview guide.
- ▸One of three practice team leads; guide three solutions architects and own a $4M annual booking quota, attained ~125% (~$5M) in FY2026.
- ▸Built and lead an internal AI tooling library of 13 skills spanning the full engagement lifecycle, from SOW review and architecture design guides through MAP readouts, licensing assessments, Jira task generation, and change orders. Authored 9 net-new and contributed ~90% of commits and ~21,000 lines in three weeks.
- ▸Lead AllCloud North America's AWS One OLA (Optimization and Licensing Assessment) partner certification: completed the Microsoft enablement track, produced the full deliverable set against an AWS-set ~600-server scenario, and submitted for AWS approval.
- ▸Audited ~100 customer engagements for pipeline hygiene, surfacing that ~10% carried no CRM record and roughly half no supporting documentation.
- ▸Time from opportunity creation to solutions-architect engagement on supported opportunities improved ~42% across tenure (median ~17 days to ~10), with same-day engagement rising from ~15% to ~35%.
Sr. Pre-Sales Solutions Architect
July 2025 – July 2026
- ▸Led technical discovery, requirements analysis, and reference architecture design across the AWS portfolio. Authored statements of work, level-of-effort estimates, TCO models, and technical proposals, and presented architecture and cost narratives to customer executives.
- ▸Partnered with account executives on technical qualification, scoping, and close. Built proofs of concept to de-risk technical decisions before customers committed budget, and registered and managed AWS partner funding programs.
- ▸Technical solutions architect on ~150 opportunities, closing ~70 at ~$10.5M in services revenue and influencing ~$23M in total pipeline.
- ▸Carried the highest technical request volume of 37 solution architects globally, roughly 145 requests and ~55% more than the next-highest, sustained at ~10 opportunities per month over 15 months.
- ▸~62% win rate by count, ~80% by value, roughly 10 points above the solutions architect team average. Median ~40 days from opportunity creation to close.
- ▸Registered ~$1.2M across 16 AWS MAP programs (Assess and Mobilize).
- ▸Produced ~30 level-of-effort and estimate packages in four months, ~10 named SOWs and proposals, and 5 proofs of concept, all five closed won.
- ▸Quantified that ~340 of ~590 person-hours (~58%) of pre-sales effort on non-converting deals was artifact production, then helped build and tune the AI assistant that now automates it.
- ▸Established AllCloud's first standardized pre-sales artifact set: handover document template, discovery questionnaire, SOW input structure, and an estimation workbook used 12+ times.
Sr. Cloud Solutions Architect
May 2024 – July 2025
- ▸Led technical workshops and advised customers on architectural and strategic IT decisions, translating business and application requirements into technical requirements and designing highly scalable, flexible, and resilient cloud architectures.
- ▸Owned end-to-end AWS delivery: assessment, architecture design, landing zone build, migration execution, and operational handoff, authoring architecture design guides and presenting final readouts to stakeholders.
- ▸Provided pre-sales architecture support alongside delivery work, per the role remit, which is what led to the move into the pre-sales practice.
- ▸Designed and deployed AWS infrastructure across compute, networking, storage, identity, and security. Implemented infrastructure as code in AWS CDK, CloudFormation, and Terraform, and hardened environments against the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
- ▸Delivered 17 AWS engagements across 11 industries covering landing zones, MAP migrations, modernization, security posture, and cost optimization. Ran up to 5 concurrently, typically 3 to 6 months, the largest spanning 14 months and 4+ workstreams.
- ▸Assessed a global mining enterprise's Azure estate for AWS migration: ~320 VMs across 8 regions, ~30 subscriptions, ~400 TB allocated storage, and ~200 GB per day of log ingestion under 24-month retention.
- ▸Architected a multi-tenant SaaS platform of 7 products and ~65 microservices on EKS, one dedicated AWS account per tenant, replacing in-cluster PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, and RabbitMQ with managed AWS services and implementing US federal M-21-31 logging controls.
- ▸Deployed Landing Zone Accelerator across 6 engagements; delivered Azure-to-AWS, Rackspace-to-AWS, and on-premises-to-AWS migrations.
- ▸Authored or co-authored architecture design guides for 9 engagements, plus the SaaS design guide template reused on 4+ engagements since.
- ▸4 delivery engagements converted into follow-on or expansion work.
See the blog archive for technology write-ups from 2015–2020 (read-only).
Letters of recommendation and contact information for all previous employers available upon request.
Education
Bachelor of Arts
School of Journalism & Mass Communication
A Journalism degree turned out to be training for writing design docs that people actually read.
Dean's List
Recognition across multiple semesters.
Intramural sports
Football and softball through school.
Bobcat Build
Student community service; Student Volunteer Connection.
The University Star
Student journalist for the university newspaper.
Certifications
AWS · Proctored
Full history · filter by vendor
Spans Dell / VMware partner enablement in 2017 through current AWS proctored exams and AWS training badges. Click any dot to verify on Credly.
About this site
WordPress → Next.js on AWS
The previous version of this site was a 2015-era WordPress install on The7 theme. This rewrite is its opposite: no server, no plugins, no database. Infrastructure is code. Deploys are a git push.
| Aspect | WordPress (old) | Next.js + AWS (new) |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | BlueHost unlimited plan (shared across ~30 sites) | Pennies per month (this site alone; actual numbers pending a few weeks of traffic) |
| First-load time | 3 to 4 s | < 1 s |
| Security posture | Theme + plugin patch treadmill | Zero server; signed OAC; managed TLS |
| Update workflow | FTP or wp-admin clickops | git push; Actions handles the rest |
| Infra definition | None (clickops) | AWS CDK in TypeScript |
Design trade-offs
- ▸CloudFlare for DNS instead of Route 53; keeps this project single-account and lets me skip cross-account delegation. Trade-off: ACM validation needs a manual CNAME.
- ▸No WAF; saves ~$5/mo and a portfolio site doesn't warrant managed-rules cost.
- ▸OAC, not OAI; AWS's 2023+ recommended pattern for signed S3-origin access.
- ▸Static export, not SSR; zero servers and no per-request logic. Fits a resume, not a SaaS.
The original site is preserved as a read-only static snapshot at/legacy/for posterity; same domain, same bucket, no WordPress runtime involved.